The Essential Paranoid Political Thrillers of the '90s

In the 1990s, America had no enemies. So we had to make up new ones.

Okay, that’s a very simplistic way of looking at the Clinton era, and certainly all manner of suffering existed within and without the country’s borders. But there’s no denying that the U.S. embraced an End of History ethos, the belief that Western liberalism and free-market capitalism had become the height of civilization.

But because good stories require good conflicts, Americans weren’t done with bad guys. Instead of external, obvious threats, we told stories about secret bad guys, hidden evils lurking within our schools, our neighborhoods, and our governments. Where the immediacy of Watergate and the gritty aesthetics of the New Hollywood movement kept the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s grounded in some